If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVINGLife,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
More John Irving Quotes
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING -
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING -
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
JOHN IRVING -
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING -
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING -
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING -
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVING -
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
JOHN IRVING -
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING -
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
JOHN IRVING -
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING -
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
JOHN IRVING -
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING







